A credible presentation
of Redemption today

by Philip Kariatlis*

"God became human so that human beings may
become God"(St Athanasius).

Introduction

In the history of theology, one can detect quite
different, but not necessarily opposing emphases in the
understanding of redemption (ie the way God redeems humanity
and the world) in the Western and Eastern Churches. In the
past the Roman Catholic Church has tended to
understand redemption in terms of legal, juridical and
forensic categories. In his famous book, which has
influenced all subsequent treatments on redemption,
Anselm argued that the sin of humankind had offended
God and that the justice of God could only be served by
making a 'satisfaction' or just payment of the
penalty. Moreover the various Protestant Churches
have understood redemption in terms of 'penal
substitution' models. In the Orthodox Churches,
especially with the patristic revival in the middle of
this century the doctrine of the redemption has been linked
up with the Incarnation of Christ and
deification.

In Orthodox theology, redemption is not seen in juridical
terms, whereby one is simply redeemed from the wrath of God
and granted an extrinsic justification as a result of the
fall. Whilst the consequences of the 'fall' must not be
downplayed, redemption, nevertheless must not to be
understood merely as forgiveness of sins and humanity's
reconciliation to God. Eastern theology sees redemption
in positive terms whereby one is actually called to
really participate in the personal and divine energies of
the Trinity as a result of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.
Or to put it another way, redemption is a gracious and
divine gift which is bestowed by the grace of the Holy
Spirit in the Church today, granting all faithful, a
personal experience of Christ who in turn leads us to God,
His Father. It is this paper's contention that, even though
there are a host of redemption models (such as ransom,
propitiation, adoption, reconciliation, forgiveness,
deliverance) which Western theology tends to highlight, the
Eastern perspective must also be taken seriously so that a
credible presentation of redemption might once again
adequately confirm the wonder of God's saving acts in
history. Therefore it is the purpose of this brief paper to
outline the Orthodox understanding of redemption. And the
importance of the Incarnation and the doctrine of
deification are foundational for approaching the mystery of
redemption today.

The Incarnation

The way redemption is understood greatly affects our
theology of the Incarnation. If redemption, for example is
understood merely in terms of justification or
sanctifica-tion, then the Incarnation simply took place so
that Christ could justify or sanctify humanity both from the
ancestral sin of the world and our own personal sins.
Archbishop Stylianos has rightly pointed out, however that
such a conception of the mystery of the Incarnation, whilst
not erroneous as such, is nevertheless juridical and
mechanical. It makes God dependent on the mishaps of human
adventure since God is understood to have incarnated, not
freely as part of His pre-eternal will, but only in reaction
to the sin of the world so as to rectify the human
predicament gone wrong. It is as though the Incarnation was
an accidental event on the part of God so as to restore
divine-human communion which had been broken. Such an
understanding, however, deprives God, Archbishop Stylianos
rightly argues of the magnitude of His love and
providence.1 If, on the other hand redemption is
comprehended in terms of deification then the Incarnation is
necessary, with or without the world's 'fall' since God's
Logos would have become human (ie hypostatically uniting
Himself with human nature) so as to deify or intimately
unite Himself with the entire created cosmos. Far from being
seen as a remedy to a sinful world, the Incarnation is now
understood as the fulfillment of God's plan of communion
with the entire cosmos He loved so much (cf Jn 3:16).

In the East, therefore the fact that the Word
became flesh and died for us has not meant that
humankind has simply been justified from God's anger,
but rather that it has assumed an intimate and
hypostatical unity2with divinity itself.
The essence of our redemption lies in the lifting up of
human nature into an everlasting communion with the divine
life which was realized by Christ's redeeming work. The
whole emphasis of the Greek fathers centered upon this
foundational conception: the Incarnation of the Word as the
fulfillment of God's entire redemptive process. The whole
destiny and history of humankind was on its way to being
fully realized in the Incarnation. The Incarnation is not to
be seen as a reduction of Christ's divinity to put right the
world which had 'missed its mark' but on the contrary, a
lifting-up of human persons, the deification or theosis of
human nature. The East has always seen the Incarnation as
the union of divine majesty with human frailty
and therefore the ultimate redemptive act of God.

As it has been stated above, the Greek fathers saw the
Incarnation as that which began the whole process of our
redemption. But more than that, the fathers spoke of the
original destiny of human nature as one leading to a
hypostatic union with the divine Logos in Christ - ie our
deification. Christ, who as the perfect union of divine and
human3 opened the way for our human nature to
participate in the divine. For this reason many fathers
interpreted the Incarnation of the Logos not as a
simple consequence of the fall, but as the fulfillment of
the original will of God - namely that in the person of
the Logos, human nature was capable of being united with the
divine. In his book, Deification in Christ, Nellas
wonderfully summed it up in this way:

"Christ is not the result of an act of Satan. The union
of the divine and human natures took place because it
fulfilled the eternal will of Cod..... Prior to the
hypostatic union of the divine nature with the human, man
even before the fall was anterior to Christ, a fact which
means that even then, in spite of not having sinned, man had
need of salvation, since he was an imperfect and incomplete
"child". This teaching lies at the core of the theology of
St Irenaeus. Human nature could not have been completed
simply by its tendency; it had to attain union with the
Archetype. Since Christ is "the head of the body, the
Church" (Col. 1.18), a fact which means in patristic thought
that Christ is the head of true humanity, as long as human
nature had not received the hyposta-sis of the Logos it was
in some way without real hypostasis - it lacked real
substance".4

Nellas indicated in the strongest possible way that the
deification of humanity, even if humanity had not sinned,
needed the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures
of Christ in the Logos - ie the Incarnation.

The hypostatic union of divine and human
accomplished in Christ, was the very foundation of
the deification of humanity. Since Christ took on
human nature and bestowed upon it the fullness of grace, He
made humanity capable of ascending to God. Therefore St
Athanasius could say that "God became human so that
humanity may become God".5 It is the gift of the
Incarnation which gives humanity the possibility of
deification. Since the first Adam went astray and deprived
himself of the gratuitous gift of union with God, the Second
Adam, the divine Logos achieved this union of the two
natures in his person. Therefore the Incarnation of Christ
does not simply redeem humanity from the effects of the fall
but completes the pre-fallen nature of humanity by
deifying it. For the fathers, the deification of Christ's
human nature became the vessel by which our human nature too
could be deified. This is the basis of the theology of
deification which is found in the fathers. Meyendorff also
described it in this way:

"The hypostatic union of divinity and humanity in Jesus
Christ is the very foundation of salvation, and therefore of
deification: in Christ, humanity has already participated in
the uncreated life of God because the 'flesh' has truly
become 'the flesh of God'".6

The above quotation clearly states that the incarnation
is the presupposition for God's ultimate redemptive act in
deifying the entire world.

Such is the fundamental position of the Incarnation of
the Word for a credible and contemporary teaching on
redemption. The Incarnation of the Logos has opened to all
human persons the possibility of restoring their unity with
God. And the death of Christ was effective in humanity's
redemption, not because it satisfied a transcendent Justice
which required retribution for humanity's sins but because
it was the death of the Son of God in the flesh (ie, in
virtue of the hypostatic union). Fr Georges Florovsky wrote
that

"the death of the Cross was effective, not as a death
of an Innocent One, but as the death of the Incarnate
Lord".7

The Orthodox notion of redemption is clearly not simply
an act to satisfy a legal requirement, but one which
destroys death by his death and opens the way for our
immortality. For this reason many fathers would view the
mystery of the Incarnation independent of the 'fall'. This
hypostatic, complete mingling of created and uncreated
natures without division or confusion had as its immediate
consequence the deification of the nature created in Christ
and by extension human nature in general. And it is to this
doctrine of deification that we now turn

Deification - the human
destiny

For the Eastern fathers, the formulation of the doctrine
of 'deification', affirmed the reality of humanity's
innermost hope as "belonging to God". St Gregory
Nazianzus argued that the root of a person's true
greatness and calling lay in being "called to be a
god".8Elsewhere, St Basil the Great
insisted that "the goal of our calling is to become
like god".9The ultimate redemptive destiny
of humanity is none other than to attain likeness to God and
union with Him. Deification denotes a direct union
and a total transformation of the human person with the
living God by divine grace. St Basil the Great said that
human beings are nothing less than creatures that have
received the order to become gods.10 The descent
(katavasis) of God has offered the created order the
capability of ascending (anavasis) to the Divine in the Holy
Spirit. For the Eastern fathers, deification is God's
greatest gift to, and the innermost goal of human existence.
Although the term does not occur in the Holy Scriptures, the
Greek fathers believed that it was a fitting theological
term affirming the command of 2 Peter 1:4 - ie "to become
participants of the divine nature". Regarding
deification, a seventh century father, St Anastasius of
Sinai, writes the following:

"Deification is the elevation to what is better, but
not the reduction of our nature to something less, nor is
it an essential change of our human nature. A divine
plan, it is the willing condescension of tremendous
dimension by God, which He did for the salvation of
others. That which is of God is that which has been
lifted up to a greater glory, without its own nature
being changed".11

This is an important statement because it rejects all
forms of pantheism.

Now, the patristic tradition has always sought to stress
the importance of the process of deification in reference to
redemption. As a result of the enhypostasia of the
second Person of the Trinity, Christ's humanity, in virtue
of the communicatio idiomatum [communication of
attributes, divine and human] is a deified humanity,
which does not lose its human characteristics in any way. In
fact, on the contrary these human attributes become more
real since they model the divine according to which they
were created. For the Eastern patristic tradition, the basis
of humanity's deification is clearly found in the hypostatic
union between the divine and human natures of Christ. These
divine energies in Christ, as a result of the 'communication
of attributes' reach all those who live a life literally in
Christ. Ultimately redemption means deification which is the
supreme goal for which humankind was created.

Conclusion

All that has been said thus far necessitates a
theological synthesis between the Western and Eastern
theologies of redemption. Despite the Western understanding
of redemption in terms of penal substitution or satisfaction
models this article has examined the Eastern understanding
of redemption - a redemption which ultimately calls all of
the created order to deification by grace. What is called
for therefore today is a complementary understanding of
redemption so that the fullness of humanity's true existence
might be realized. Only when the Orthodox understanding of
redemption is taken seriously can the whole ideal of
redemption be credibly presented today. All too often, the
West speaks of juridical models at the expense of other
models. On the other hand, the East is all too often tempted
to speak of redemption solely in Incarnation and deification
terms. All Biblical perspectives are necessary for a
complete and wholistic understanding of redemption. In a
world where our struggles often seem hopeless, where our
life seems meaningless because death is ever present, the
good news and foundation of our hope is that Christ has
overcome death and granted life in the tombs.12
The Incarnation of the Logos offers us a "life in Christ"
empowering us to live as Christ, to love as Christ, to serve
as Christ and to be one with Christ.

Lectures delivered at St Andrew's Theological
College, 2004

By hypostatic union is simply meant the union in the
person or hyposta-sis of Christ of the natures of
divinity and humanity.

cf. the teaching of Chalcedon (451AD) on their
teaching of Christ: "Following the holy fathers we teach
with one voice that the Son of God and our Lord Jesus
Christ is to be confessed as one and the same (Person),
and he is perfect in Divinity and perfect in Humanity,
true God and true Man. This one and the same Jesus
Christ, the only-begotten Son (of God) must be confessed
to be in two natures, without mixture and without
change, without separation and without
division."